Chapter 14
Making Your Brand Stand Out
In This Chapter
Creating a powerful brand identity
Naming your brand well
Fitting your products into branded product lines
Pumping up current products and introducing new ones
Knowing when it’s time to improve or replace a product
The brand is the heart and soul of any marketing program. If the product is good and has a strong, appealing identity (the brand), then the marketing program has a high chance of success. In this book, I use the word product as an umbrella term that means a product, a service, or anything else your company wants to sell. The brand is the special identity you give this product, or line of products, through your marketing. You may even think of yourself as a branded product at times — for instance, when applying for jobs or running for office. The marketer’s approach to branding products is a powerful one, and this chapter has tons of great tools and techniques you can use, whatever your current marketing challenge may be.
Burning Your Brand into Your Customers’ Minds
The term brand comes from the old practice of burning a permanent mark, or brand, onto the flanks of cattle to identify a herd. It was a common practice in the Western United States because cattle roamed widely and an owner could easily lose his valuable herd without a durable, unique identifier. Today the term is used a bit differently. A brand is no longer burned into the skin. However, marketers still hope to burn their brand into their customers’ minds.
You may get some clues to successful branding from looking at the history of branding by ranchers. A traditional cattle brand took one of three forms: the name in simplified form (usually two initials), the initials plus a simple symbol, or a symbol alone. Today’s business, consumer, and nonprofit brands still take one of these three simple forms, and yours should, too. Whichever form it takes (name alone, name plus symbol, or symbol alone), your brand needs to be clear, distinctive, appropriate, and appealing; you also need to repeat it consistently and frequently so people can recognize it instantly.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or have been in business for some time, taking a closer look at your brand and how you use it in your marketing can pay off. The following sections help you do just that.
Getting tough about your brand identity
Many businesses fail to control their brand presentation and allow more variation than is good for their marketing. In fact, this is the most common problem I find when I do marketing strategy consults with small- and mid-sized businesses as well as nonprofits, such as museums, schools, colleges, and social service agencies. It’s not that these marketers disagree about the need to manage brand presentation; it’s just that there are so many different facets to one’s communication with the outside world and so many opportunities for small problems to accumulate into a big problem of brand inconsistency.
You need to have a standard for your brand that’s as hard, clear, and unwavering as an iron brand. If your brand isn’t iron-hard, then you need to review it and settle on a single, strong identity that you can use in all media at all times. (Sometimes this requirement necessitates a review of the name itself. If you find you’ve had to develop multiple names or name variants for different purposes, that’s a sure sign your name isn’t a comfortable fit and needs updating or out-and-out changing.) Variation in your brand presentation confuses people, reduces recognition, and dilutes the strength of your brand. Get tough about your branding and stick to your guns!
Narrowing logo options down to one strong design
Indecision is the enemy of effective branding. Think about the brands you know best, such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, or IBM. You may see minor (and highly intentional) variations in how their logos are presented, but generally, they’re as clear and consistent as if they were burned by an iron brand. Is yours?
To ensure that customers and prospects recognize your brand immediately, you need to have a single, strong logo design in place. But first you need to choose that winning design from a variety of options. If you hire someone to help you define or refine your brand, ask him to give you a broad selection of possible logos. Most designers do this on their own, but sometimes designers just want to come up with one design, which is why you need to push them to develop good alternatives (not just straw men for you to knock down).
If you’re not sure how to determine what makes a strong logo, put yourself in the shoes of Herb Chambers Business Consulting, a case study I developed for marketing classes I sometimes teach at the Eisenberg School of Business. (The case is based on a real client but features a fictitious name so students can’t find “the answer” online but rather must solve it themselves.) Herb Chambers Business Consulting is trying to come up with one clear, bold, appealing version of the firm’s brand identity to use in all of its marketing communications. Even though the firm has been in business for many years, its brand identity isn’t a marketing asset, so the company is asking a marketing team to come up with some suggestions for a new logo. The first suggestion many teams arrive at is to simplify the name to Chambers Business Consulting. Figure 14-1 shows a selection of first-round ideas for a Chambers Business Consulting logo, including a variety of ways to brand the name using different typefaces and some ideas involving the use of the business’s initials.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 14-1: A selection of design ideas for branding a consulting firm.
After you have an initial selection of design ideas for your logo, take a week or more to evaluate them and make sure one really stands out as superior and meets all your needs. If no one option really stands out, identify what you like and dislike about the top three designs and send the designer back to come up with another set of options. Sometimes it takes many of these design-and-review cycles to come up with the perfect logo, so don’t be impatient.
The perfect logo appeals visually to everyone involved in marketing, stands out from competitors and other well-known brands, contributes to a strongly positive brand image or personality, and makes your brand name memorable when shown on letterhead, packaging, brochures and e-brochures, or the top left corner of a web landing page.
In the case of Chambers Business Consulting, none of the initial designs were as strong as hoped, so the marketing team went back to the drawing board. The main objections were that the logos based on the name alone (refer to Figure 14-1) lacked visual strength and appeal, while the logos based only on the initials were visually stronger but failed to remind people of the firm’s name. Also, some of the designs seemed too modern, because the marketing team wanted to project a solid, traditional look that clients would view as highly trustworthy and professional.
Figure 14-2 shows a second-generation design for the new Chambers Business Consulting brand identity. This logo presents the company’s brand name in a distinguished font called Engravers MT, which, as its name implies, is based on traditional engravings in stone and metal. The idea was to convey a sense of solidity and traditional reliability through the brand’s appearance. On stationery and business cards, the logo may be shown in plain black ink. However, when color is an option (like on the web, in PowerPoint slide presentations, or in full-color brochures), the logo can appear as if it’s carved into a bronze plaque (the firm could also use a real bronze plaque as the sign in its office lobby). The firm’s new logo presents a strong, easily recognized brand identity in a consistent manner wherever the firm’s name appears.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 14-2: The final design improved upon the initial concepts.
To help you keep your brand consistent, maintain a master style sheet specifying the font size and type style and how the design elements relate to each other. Don’t permit any variations beyond the style sheet; otherwise you’re failing to protect your logo.
The Chambers Business Consulting case is a good model for you to follow as you examine your own brand identity and make sure it’s as strong and consistent as possible. Is your brand presenting strongly and well with a good clear logo that you repeat everywhere you can? Figure 14-3 shows two additional brand identities to give you more ideas about how to approach the important challenge of designing the strongest logo you can for your brand. Note that both logos include a clear, simple visual element along with the brand name written in a standardized type style. The relationship between the type and the art should be fixed — relative spacing and size should never vary, even when the logo is enlarged for signs or reduced for business cards.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 14-3: Distinctive brand identities for small businesses.
Focusing on your website
Because a strong Internet presence is now more critical for marketing success than ever before, pay special attention to making sure your brand is displayed effectively on the web. Every landing page and website home page must present a noticeable, simple, clear, memorable, brand mark in the top left corner of the screen. This is a pretty good general rule, but one that’s often violated. Even expert marketers too often flub their web branding.
At the time of this writing, Adobe, maker of software used to design almost all brand identities, does a poor job of presenting its own brand: a horizontal red rectangle with an inner white square against which a boxy red A appears. The logo itself isn’t my favorite because it fails to capture the sophistication and elegance of the company’s software; however, setting that concern aside, the bigger issue with Adobe’s web displays is that its logo is very small and seems secondary to the tabs across the top of the web page.
You want to make the logo big and bold, and give it some personal space to show that it’s powerful! A good example of how to highlight your logo is provided by Web Designer Depot, whose website (at www.webdesignerdepot.com) includes a large gold circle on the top left corner with the black cursive W — that is, the company’s logo virtually leaping out of it due to the contrast of the bold black letter against the bright gold background color. To add more interest and memorability, the W is animated, so if you accidentally brush across it with your mouse (or finger on a device with a touch screen), it rotates clockwise — a surprise that makes you stop and look at it long enough to commit it to perpetual memory.
The logo can be a letter or symbol (such as a stylized drawing of a mountain or tree), or it can be a name, set in a distinctive typeface and color or colors. eBay epitomizes the latter strategy, on web and off. Open any page in eBay, and you’ll always see the distinctive eBay logo in four colors, with plenty of white space around it to make it pop visually.
Branding throughout your “herd”
As a marketer, you need to be just as systematic and strong about your branding as an old-fashioned rancher branding his herd. You can think of your modern-day marketing herd as all the (possibly hundreds) of different ways you may communicate with customers, prospects, and the world at large.
Whether you’re marketing through your blog, a YouTube video, signs, stationery, brochures, or other means, you need to burn your brand into these initiatives clearly and strongly, without variation in the essentials of its design. Evaluate your brand identity to make sure it’s presented consistently and that it appears everywhere possible. If you already have a distinctive brand, stick with it and focus on rolling it out consistently everywhere you can. If it suffers from weak design or is virtually unknown, then redesign it before rolling it out aggressively.
Your brand name and logo don’t have to be the most beautiful, sophisticated, or clever to be successful. In fact, many top brands are strikingly simple. What sets them apart from other brands is that they’re recognizable and known, which in turn gives them value and helps them sell products. Rolling your brand out consistently and strongly is even more important than perfecting your logo design. Choose something that’s clear and simple and then stick to it no matter what. Pretend your brand identity is an old-fashioned iron brand. If you see it as carved in metal, you’ll resist any efforts to treat it as something flexible.
Many websites fail to present a brand properly and well. Don’t let yours be one of them! Make the web design match your brand, not the other way around. And when your designer lays out a new blog, web page, or other page, insist that it be designed to showcase your logo. See the preceding section for details.
Coming Up with a Brand Name
When branding your company or new product, you want to make sure it has a name that customers can easily identify with you. You have several important factors to consider, and the next sections can help.
Naming your brand with personality
Branding a product or company is a little like giving a new puppy a name. You want to get a feel for its personality first so you can give it a name that fits. You can call a standoffish poodle Fifi, but that name doesn’t fit a playful mutt. When naming your brand, you want to give it a clear personality that becomes its intangible signature. Customers get to know the brand personality when it’s reflected in everything, from choice of fonts and colors to the style and approach of advertising copy.
The Ford Mustang is presumed to have the personality of the fast, tough horse of the American plains from which the car took its name. The idea is that the driver is a modern-day cowboy, akin to the real cowboys who broke and used the mustangs for their work. This strategy has a powerful effect because it uses existing terms whose meaning marketers apply to their products. And the fact that Mustang is a 50-year-old brand with truly famous models dating as far back as the 1960s means that the brand equity is worth more than its current 3 percent of Ford’s sales. In fact, Ford Motor Company is promoting the 2014 Mustang heavily, both in the United States and abroad, with the expectation that it will boost overall Ford brand strength. It is, after all, the Ford Mustang, not just the Mustang, and that gives the parent company a halo effect it can use to promote other Ford lines, too. You may not be ready to ride a mustang this year, so the theory goes, but perhaps a Ford with a bit more cultured of a personality will be a good fit and allow you to keep in touch with that latent wild side to your own personality.
How can you ensure that your brand name exudes a winning personality? Try one of these two simple exercises to help you start to define your brand’s personality:
- Select an animal that’s most like your brand or what you want your brand to be. What animal did you come up with? An elephant — big, powerful, intelligent, and long lasting? A bee — busy and industrious? A cat — quick, sleek, attractive, and smart? An eagle — a natural leader flying high above the rest? A butterfly — delicate and light, spreading beauty where it flies? Don’t laugh at this exercise. Many brands receive the personalities commonly associated with animals. For example, the United States is branded as an eagle for its intended leadership role on the world stage.
- Ask yourself what your brand would be like if it were human. Would it be female or male? An adventurous teenager or a wise elder? What personality would it have? Human personality traits appeal to humans, so it makes sense to position your brand using dimensions of real personalities.
Identifying your brand’s personality traits
Research psychologists rarely agree on anything, but they do agree that human beings have five broad dimensions to their outward personalities. Every person can be defined by where he or she falls on these five dimensions. To define your brand more clearly, you may describe it by using these five factors of human personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.
Table 14-1 shows the range of options. Circle one of the answers on each row to define your brand’s characteristic personality. Then reference this table whenever you design anything, from a logo to a letter, and make sure your marketing communications are consistent with the brand personality you’ve chosen. Over time, you’ll teach the market about your brand’s unique personality, and consumers will become increasingly comfortable with your brand because they’ll feel like they really know it.
Table 14-1 Defining Your Brand’s Unique Personality
Does Your Brand Seem … |
Your Answer |
|
Extroverted: Outgoing. Makes friends easily. Sociable. Takes charge. |
Yes |
No |
|
Agreeable: Makes people feel at ease. Is on good terms with nearly everyone. Trusts people. Thinks of others first. |
Yes |
No |
|
Conscientious: Does a thorough job. Well prepared. Gets chores done right away. Does things according to a plan. |
Yes |
No |
|
Emotionally stable: Relaxed. Calm. Handles stress well. Not easily bothered. |
Yes |
No |
|
Open to experiences: Imaginative. Creative. Intelligent. Has many interests. Quick to understand things. |
Yes |
No |
Unlike humans, brands may have simple, one-dimensional personalities, so if you check only one “yes” in Table 14-1, that’s okay. Perhaps you define your brand simply as conscientious. This trait would be perfect for a line of file cabinets, for example. Or you may create a richer personality for your brand by adding one or two additional traits (your line of file cabinets could also be stable or even imaginatively styled if they’re designed to be visible to the buyers’ customers). With these traits, designers and writers can consistently present a calm, organized but also stylish personality for your brand of file cabinets.
You can’t change your own personality very easily, but you do get to pick the traits you consider most helpful for marketing your brand. For instance, a new line of cosmetics may be portrayed as extroverted and open to experiences. Dynamic, exciting colors and sounds will help convey this sociable, creative, enthusiastic personality to consumers, who’ll buy the brand in order to add those traits to their own lives when they feel the need for them.
Giving a memorable and meaningful name
Would a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? In poetry perhaps, but not in marketing. The name rose is a wonderful brand identity for the flower. It’s short and simple yet smooth and pleasant to speak, and it has come to be associated with the most popular and romantic of all flowers. But what if your brand name isn’t as appealing? For example, someone who has just purchased a small business called Franz Gingleheimer Heritage Rose Nursery may find it prudent to change the name to Antique Roses, which has a nicer sound and is easy to remember. How do you pick a new or improved name that makes your brand as appealing as a rose?
Following are some approaches you can take to name your brand so readers can remember and identify with your product:
- Give your brand an informational name. Doing so makes spreading the word about your offerings easier. For example, a business called Amherst Gallery of Figurative Art is clearly an art gallery selling figurative works. If it were called The Amherst Salon, some people would think it was a hair salon, not an art salon. Is your name informative? If not, consider making it describe your business more accurately. If you can add information power to your brand name easily and without making it too big of a mouthful, then do.
- Pick a name for your brand that’s clear, simple, short, and easy to say. How a brand feels and sounds when spoken is very important. Say “Coca-Cola” and think about the feel of it in your mouth as you speak. It’s satisfying to say. It moves through and out of the mouth in a nice way. Root beer is harder and less pleasant to pronounce, which helps explain why it’s less popular than cola.
- Select a brand name that has good visual appeal. The look of a brand is also important, so give careful thought to the imagery evoked by a name and choose a name that has good visual associations. People are very visual, so visual recognition and appeal can add tremendously to the impact of a brand. For example, star is a nice word. It evokes the image of a symbolic star, usually a five-pointed geometric form. Star Computer Repair sounds good and can easily be made to look good with a logo that includes a star along with the name. Many logos tap into the visual appeal of a simple symbol, and you can, too. Shell Oil Company benefits from the strong visual appeal of its logo, a golden scallop outlined in red. The company is usually known simply as Shell due to the power of its visual logo.
- Make up a brand-new word that has no prior meaning and hasn’t been used before. This approach gives you something you can more easily protect in a court of law, but it isn’t necessarily effective at communicating the character of your product. Also, you have to invest considerable time and money in creating a meaning for the new name in consumers’ minds.
When you use meaningful components for your made-up names, they’re called morphemes, which NameLab, Inc. (a San Francisco–based leading developer of such names), defines as the semantic kernels of words. For example, NameLab started with the word accurate (from the Latin word accuratus) and extracted a morpheme from it to use as a new car brand: Acura. The company also developed Compaq, Autozone, Lumina, and Zapmail in the same manner. Each one is a new word to the language, but each word communicates something about the product because of the meanings consumers associate with that word’s components.
Many new brand names are formed by semi-scientific re-combinations of root syllables, which make them sound semi-scientific. Consider asking poets and songwriters for input, too. Perhaps one of them will come up with a unique new word that is appealing to the ear when heard and, when spoken, forms nicely on the tongue. Melodious words are more memorable than technical or awkward ones. (Hence the enduring popularity of any bar drink that is baptized with a melodious name: Wouldn’t you want to try a Singapore sling? It’s been popular since the 1930s. Before that, it was called the gin sling and didn’t enjoy the same global popularity. I attribute the difference entirely to its renaming.)
Designing a Product Line
A product line is any logical grouping of products offered to customers. (Remember: Products can be goods, services, ideas, or even people — such as political candidates or movie stars.) You usually identify product lines by an umbrella brand name with individual brand identities falling under that umbrella. After you establish a strong brand (see the earlier sections in this chapter for help doing just that), you can extend it to a line of products. The stronger the brand (if people know and like it, of course), the longer the line of products. A really well-established brand name has the strength to make a wide range of products appealing.
The sections that follow provide valuable insight about what to consider when developing your product line, how to manage the product line after you develop it, and what to do to protect its identity.
Eyeing depth and breadth
You have two key issues to consider when designing your product line:
- Depth: How many alternatives should you give customers within any single category? For example, should you make a single T-shirt design in a range of sizes? How about offering the design in a variety of colors? Both of these options increase depth because they give customers more options. Depth gives you an advantage because it improves the likelihood of a good fit between an interested customer and your product. You don’t want to miss a sale because somebody was too big to wear a size large.
Increase depth when you’re losing customers because you don’t have a product for them. Increasing your depth of choice reduces the chance of disappointing a prospective customer.
- Breadth: Breadth comes from offering more types or categories of products. For example, if you sell one popular T-shirt design, you can increase your product line’s breadth by offering more T-shirt designs or (to go even broader) by adding sweatshirts, baseball caps, and other items that can be silkscreened with designs. When you add anything that the customer views as a separate choice, not a variant of the same choice, you’re adding breadth to your product line. A broad line of T-shirts includes dozens and dozens of different designs. A broad and deep product line offers each of those designs in many sizes and on many different colors and forms of T-shirts.
Increase breadth whenever you can think of a new product that seems to fit in the product line and that you believe will increase your sales without sacrificing profits. By fit, I mean that customers can see the new product’s obvious relationship to the line. Don’t mix unrelated products — that’s not a product line, because it doesn’t have a clear, logical identity to customers. But do keep stretching a successful line as long as sales continue to grow. Doing so makes sense for one simple reason: You sell new products to old customers. Of course, the line may also reach new customers, which is great. But you can sell to your old customers more easily (read: less costly), so you definitely want to do more business with them in the future; offering them new products within a popular product line is a great way to do this.
Managing your product line effectively
The secret to good product management is the motto “Don’t leave well enough alone.” But if you keep growing your product lines, you can obviously bump into some practical limits after a while. How do you know when the pendulum is going to swing the other way — when it’s time to do some spring-cleaning? (One easy indicator: Too much variety in your lineup to fit on your main website anymore.)
You should decrease your depth or breadth (or both; see the preceding section for more on these concepts) if you find that certain items never or hardly ever sell. Also prune back if your distribution channels don’t display the full product line to customers. Often distribution becomes a bottleneck, imposing practical limits on how big a product line you can bring to the customer’s attention.
When I consulted for the Kellogg Brush Company some years ago, I was amazed to discover it made many hundreds of different items. Yet the grocery and hardware stores selling its products never displayed more than a couple dozen items. Obviously, the company’s product line was far broader and deeper than its end customers ever realized. I recommended that the company either develop a direct catalog- or Internet-based distribution channel to bring these choices to customers or cut its product line back to the top items purchased by retailers and try to make those items better and cheaper. (It chose the latter option.)
Protecting your product line and brand
You can gain legal protection for your product, a specific line of products, or even your entire company by using, and getting legal recognition for, a unique identifier. This protection can apply to names, short verbal descriptions, and visual symbols. All of these forms of identification are marks that can represent the identity of the thing you apply them to. A tangible product’s name and/or visual symbol is a trademark. A service name is termed a service mark (U.S. law treats a service mark similarly to a trademark). A business name is a trade name (again, with similar protection under U.S. law).
In the United States, you establish and protect your rights to exclusive use of any unique trademark by using it. Yes, you should register it (with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — contact any law firm handling intellectual property to find out how). But registering the trademark isn’t nearly as important as using the trademark. In other countries, usage and registration also matter, but sometimes governments reverse the emphasis, meaning without registration, usage gives you no protection. So check with local authorities in each country where you plan to use a trademark.
For more information on establishing and strengthening trademarks, contact your lawyer, any experienced ad agency that does brand marketing, or a name lab. More detailed coverage of the topic can be found in Patents, Copyrights & Trademarks For Dummies, by Henri Charmasson (Wiley). Additionally, free information is available at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s trademark-specific website (www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp). There, you can download a free book, search the database, and discover info about U.S. trademark law. You can also file a trademark application online using the Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS), although I don’t really recommend doing it yourself unless you have working knowledge of trademark law.
To register your trademark in other countries, you must contact a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property. Most of the countries in which you may want to do business (including the United States) subscribe to the Berne Convention, which means your legal protection for a published work (even a label or ad) in one participating country is also honored in other participating countries.
Strengthening an Existing Product
Your existing products have some degree of brand identity and a certain amount of customer loyalty already. Often your best investment is to boost the strength of their brand image or improve their design or packaging. Doing so takes advantage of any existing brand equity, which is easier than starting from scratch.
Here’s a list of simple and quick actions you can take to build customer loyalty and grow sales by working on your product:
- Update the appearance. Many companies present good products to the world in poorly designed exteriors that don’t dress those products for success. Look at the product itself (colors, attractiveness, and visibility of brand names).
- Freshen up the packaging. A consumer product that sits on a shelf waiting for someone to pick it up should be highly visible and appealing. Can you add a brighter color to the packaging to attract the eye? Can you mention key features on the outside? Perhaps you can add a clear window to show the actual product? If you can possibly do so, you should convert to green (recycled or recyclable) packaging and promote this fact on the packaging. More and more buyers are looking for green brands.
- Make sure the product is attractive and easy to use. Your product should also feel nice — smooth, polished, soft, or whatever texture is appropriate to the product’s use. Even very minor changes in your product’s look, feel, and function can improve its appeal as well as customers’ satisfaction.
- Refresh any printed materials that come with the product. Can you improve their appearance? Dress them up? Make them clearer or more useful? Whatever you do, make sure these printed materials instill pride of ownership in the product. A professional, attractive web page should also support the product. Refresh it periodically so it doesn’t start to look out-of-date or neglected.
- Choose your product’s best quality. Coin a short phrase to communicate this best quality to the consumer and put that phrase in prominent places on the product, its packaging, and its literature. Have simple (but attractive) color-printed stickers made up for this purpose, if you want — that’s the quickest and cheapest way to add a marketing message to something.
- Eliminate confusion about which product does what for whom. If you have more than one product, clarify the differences and uses of your products by pricing and naming them distinctly (to make them obviously different). You’d be amazed how confusing most product lines look to the average buyer.
- Make your logo beautiful. Apple Computer, Inc., switched from a somewhat dated-looking rainbow-colored version of its distinctive apple-shaped logo to a sophisticated version made of a clear plastic panel backlit with diffused white light. This logo sits on the top of all of its newer laptops, giving those computers a more sophisticated appeal. Can you upgrade your image by improving the appearance of your logo on your products? (For help updating your logo, see the earlier “Narrowing logo options down to one strong design” section.)
- Pick up a related but noncompeting product from another company and repackage and distribute it as part of your product line. Adding another good product your customers like can increase their average purchase size significantly. I recommend that you use distributor-style arrangements that eliminate the investment of product development, giving you a good way to expand your product line in a hurry if you so choose. Selling a new (or new to you) product to an existing customer is often easier than finding a new customer for an existing product.
I hope this list of simple ideas for action has your marketing blood circulating! As you can see, you can do a lot with and for your products, even if you don’t have the cash or time right now to develop and introduce an entirely new product. Of course, in the long run, you’re only as good as your products, so you also need to try to update, upgrade, or perhaps even replace your current line of products. It’s a long-term but vital activity that most marketing plans need to include, just as gardeners have to remember to plan the next planting along with their more routine weeding and watering duties.
Identifying When and How to Introduce a New Product
If your market is like most, innovations give you a major source of competitive advantage. A competitor’s major new product introduction probably changes the face of your market — and upsets your sales projections and profit margins — at least once every few years. So you can’t afford to ignore new product development. You should introduce new products as often as you can afford to.
Okay, you think you need a hot new product. But where do you get the idea? First, check out the basic creativity skills covered in Chapter 5. That chapter offers a host of brainstorming and idea-generating techniques you can use. If you and your fellow marketers are stale, bring in people from the sales field, production department, repair area, or service call center. Or try bringing in some customers for a brainstorming session. There’s no single formula for inventing new products. You just need to engage in a new and different thinking process. Remember: Do something new to produce something new.
The following sections highlight various ways of coming up with new products as well as a suggestion for making your new product stand out as something noticeably new and different.
Making the old new again
Old ideas are any product concepts that you or another company have previously abandoned. They may have been considered but rejected without being marketed, or they can even be old products that have fallen out of use but can be revived with a twist. Because people have been struggling to develop new product concepts for decades in most markets, many abandoned ideas and old products are around.
Often companies fail to keep good records, so you have to interview old-timers and poke through faded files or archived catalogs to discover those old ideas. But old ideas may be a treasure trove, because technical advances or changing customer taste may make yesterday’s wild ideas today’s practical ones. Even if you can’t use any old ideas you find, they may lead you to fresh ways of thinking — perhaps they suggest a customer need that you hadn’t thought of before.
Stealing — er, borrowing — ideas
You can often profit from other people’s ideas through licenses. A private inventor may have a great new product concept and a patent for it, but he may lack the marketing muscle and capital to introduce the product. You can provide that missing muscle and pay the inventor 5 or 10 percent of your net revenues as reward for his inspiration. Many companies generate inventions that fall outside of their marketing focus. These companies are often willing to license to someone specializing in the target market. That’s the official way to use other people’s ideas.
Unofficially, you can simply steal ideas. Now, by steal, I don’t mean to take anything that isn’t legally yours. A patent protects a design; a trademark protects a name or logo; and a copyright protects writing, artwork, performances, and software. You must respect these legal rights that protect other people’s expressions of their ideas. But often the underlying ideas are fair game so long as you implement them in your own fresh way (when in doubt, check with your lawyer!). I call this activity “stealing” in humor. It isn’t really, if you do it legally. Some people call it “benchmarking”; others call it “being inspired by others.” Whatever you call it, be aware of new concepts and keep your product offerings up-to-date with them.
If the ideas make it to your ears or eyes through a legitimate public channel of communication, then you can often use them. Just don’t bug your competitor’s headquarters, go through its dumpster, or get its engineers drunk — doing so may violate trade secrecy laws; ask your lawyer about any questionable research.
Although a competitor may be upset to see you knocking off or improving upon its latest idea, nothing can stop you as long as your source was public (not secret) and you aren’t violating a patent, trademark, or copyright. In most markets, competitors milk each others’ ideas as a matter of routine. Also look at other industries for inspiration you can apply in your industry.
Picking your customers’ brains
A final source of new product ideas comes from your customers. Customers are actually the best source, but they don’t know it. Ask a customer to describe a brilliant new product you should provide for him, and you get a blank stare or worse. Yet frustrations with the existing products and all sorts of dissatisfactions, needs, and wants lurk in the back of all customers’ minds. You may be able to introduce a new product that helps them with their gripes.
How do you mine the treasure trove of customer needs, many of them latent or unrecognized? Collecting customers’ words helps you gain insight into how they think — so talk to them and take notes that use quotes, or record and transcribe their comments. Get them talking and let them wander a bit so you have a chance to encounter the unexpected. Also, watch customers as they buy and use your product. Observation may reveal wasted time and effort, inefficiencies, or other problems that the customer takes for granted — problems that the customer may happily say goodbye to if you point them out and remove them.
Using the significant difference strategy
New product development has a downside: Almost all new products fail. To achieve real success, you have to introduce something that really looks new and different to the market. The product needs a clear point of difference. Innovations that consumers recognize quickly and easily provide the marketer with a greater return. Researchers who study new product success use the term intensity to describe this phenomenon. The more intense the difference between your new product and old products, the more likely the new product can succeed.
The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) publishes reviews of good new books on product development via its website, www.pdma.org. PDMA also offers conferences, training, and other services to its members.
When to Upgrade an Existing Product
Some products are so perfect that they fit naturally with their customers, and you should just leave them alone. For example … well, I suppose the formula for Coca-Cola is one example, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with another. That alone tells you something important about product management: You’d better modify your products to improve performance, value, and quality with each new season and each new marketing plan.
You’re competing on a changing playing field. Your competitors are trying hard to make their products better, and you have to do the same. Always seek insights into how to improve your product. Always look for early indicators of improvements your competitors plan to make and be prepared to go one step further in your response. And always go to your marketing oracle — the customer — for insights into how you can improve your product. The next two sections describe tests that a product must pass to remain viable. If your product doesn’t pass, you need to improve or alter it somehow.
Passing the differentiation test
At the point of purchase — that place or time when customers make their actual purchase decisions — your product needs to have something special. It must pass the differentiation test by reaching out to at least a portion of the market and being better than its competition on certain criteria due to inherent design features. Or it needs to be about as good as the rest but a better value, which gives you a sustainable cost advantage. (Do you actually have such a cost advantage? Marketers generally underestimate the rarity of them! Don’t slash prices unless you actually have lower costs to support the low prices.) Or the product needs to be the best option by virtue of a lack of other options.
Don’t assume your lack of special features means that your product isn’t special. You can be special just by being there when customers need the product. You can justify keeping a product alive just by having a way of maintaining your distribution advantage. But a product at the point of purchase must have at least something special about it if you expect it to generate a good return in the future. Otherwise, it gets lost in the shuffle.
If your customers don’t think your product is unique in any way, then you may need to kill that product. But don’t set up the noose too quickly. First, see whether you can work to differentiate the product in some important way. (See the “Strengthening an Existing Product” section, earlier in this chapter, for help reinvigorating your current product offerings.)
Passing the champion test
Champions are those customers who really love your product, who insist on buying it over others, and who tell their friends or associates to do the same. Champions are great to have, but they’re also rather rare.
The championship test is tougher to pass than the differentiation test (described in the preceding section). Many products lack champions. But when a product does acquire them — when some customers anywhere in the distribution channel really love it — then that product is assured an unusually long and profitable life. Such high customer commitment should be your constant goal as you manage the life cycle of your product.
Products with champions get great word of mouth, and their sales and market shares grow because of that word of mouth. Even better, champions faithfully repurchase the products they rave about. And this repeat business provides your company with high-profit sales, compared with the higher costs associated with finding new customers. (This is one of the principles of good marketing, which you can read more about in Chapter 1.)
The hook? The repeat buyer must want to repeat the purchase. He needs to be a dedicated fan of the product. Otherwise, you need to think of each sale as a new sale that costs you almost as much as selling to someone who has never used the product before.
If your product doesn’t seem to have champions and sales aren’t growing, the product itself may be holding your brand identity hostage. Upgrading your brand image in your marketing may not be enough. You may need to improve or replace the old product so you actually deliver as much excitement to the user as your well-crafted brand identity promises. Don’t be afraid to renew your product offerings regularly. Strong brands outlive individual products.